Thursday, July 28, 2016

Remember Freedom?

‘A vote for anyone other than Donald Trump in November is a vote for Hillary," the governor of Wisconsin has spent the week of the Republican convention robotically repeating. "It's a binary choice," the speaker of the House keeps on telling us, in his less colloquial, more game-theoretical language.

This is all nonsense—rationalization masquerading as realism, sophism disguised as sophistication. "A vote for anyone other than Donald Trump" is . . . a vote for anyone other than Donald Trump. And our choice need not be, and is not in truth, a binary one; that we must choose between the two nominees of the major parties is required neither by the Constitution nor the laws of the land, nor is it the truth of what we will see on our ballots this November. Indeed, there is no legal requirement, there is no moral obligation, there is no civic duty to vote for every office on the ballot or to vote at all. Nor should there be. This is a free country.